Toby Johnson's
titles are
available in other ebook formats from Smashwords.

This article appeared in Blueboy
Magazine,
July 1984, just as the AIDS crisis was becoming visible. The hygiene advice was precocious, though incomplete; the
mode of transmission of AIDS was still unknown at the time.The advice is STILL GOOD thirty years later.

Sexual licking and other delights

Commentary: Guest Editorial

Notes on Licking

These days gay sexual practices
are being
questioned. Health problems are causing people to reevaluate how they
have close contact with other people's bodies. This reevaluation is
good, but it should not result in negative attitudes about sex itself.The following are observations about a gay sex practice
that are only
partly tongue in cheek.

1. There are biologists at Harvard who theorize that the
role of
homosexuals in human society must be genetically determined. They
explain that human beings guarantee survival by wit and intelligence.
Homosexuality is a trait naturally selected by the evolutionary process
apparently because, by enhancing human society and culture, homosexuals
make the race more fit for survival. I once met one of the Harvard
sociobiologists: he was leaving the next day to deliver a paper at a
conference in Europe on studies that showed gay men have higher I.Q.'s
than non-gays.* Masters
and Johnson found that gay men are more accomplished at sex. We must
have something to teach straights about life-and about sex.

2. In Touching:
The Human Significance of the Skin, anthropologist Ashley Montague
mentions the
importance in animals of the behavior of body licking. Cats, for
instance, lick their own genitals, perineums, and anuses and those of
their kittens. Newborn animals that are not perinerally licked are
likely to die of functional disorders of the genitourinary and/or
gastrointestinal systems. Rats lick the anogenital area on an average
of 2 minutes and 10 seconds as compared to 53 seconds for the rest of
the body. Montague noted a study in which pregnant rats were collared
with leather flanges to prevent them from licking themselves. Their
mammary glands failed to develop by some 50%. And after giving birth
they ignored their pups and let them die.

3. Psychoanalytic feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein** has
theorized that, in human beings, sexual behavior replicates mothering
behavior. Part of the pleasure of sex is its similarity to nurturing
and breastfeeding experiences during infancy.

4. Because human beings stand upright and have relatively
stiff spines
(except for a few athletes and yogis who develop certain enviable
skills), we simple can't lick our own perineums. To have the skin
crease licked between the base of the scrotum and the opening of the
anus-where the left and right sides of the body come together at the
base of the spine, we require partners.

5. In animals self-licking is linked to grooming; not sex.
But we
humans don't groom one another (except some primitives who, like
primates, pick lice off each other). Primates generally don't use their
tongues for grooming. In human beings, the practice of licking
another’s perineum would necessarily become sexual. Indeed, in human
beings the tongue has become an adjunct sexual organ—perhaps because
speech is linked to sexual relationship and communication is part of
the power that attracts people to one another.

6. And as gay men know, perineal licking, of course, is
sexual. It is
one of the most intensely pleasurable of the sexual practices. Yet it
is terribly taboo. Heterosexuals do not particularly acknowledge doing
it. Shere Hite found that only 4% of non-gay men have experienced being
rimmed. Heterosexuals are afraid of the anus. They associate any kind
of anal stimulation with homosexuality. They say that it's dirty.
They'd probably say only homosexuals would do something like that. And
that's because, being the low-life scum of the earth, we're naturally
into assholes and shit.

7. We know better. When we look at ourselves we frequently
see
beautiful people who are kind and good-hearted. We make good citizens.
We're reasonably law-abiding. We're more rational than most people: we
have necessarily learned to maintain "critical distance" from society.
We are not nearly as crazed as heterosexual men and we're really less
guilty of sexual crimes than straight men. We seldom rape one another
the way they rape their women. The sex crimes homosexuals are said to
be guilty of are things like "pedophilia" or “public sex" which are
generally problems only because they are socially defined as such, are
not violent, and are only tangential to homosexuality itself. (There
are, of course, homosexual criminals: thieves, bandits, and murderers.
And there can be perverted homosexuals the same way there can be
perverted heterosexuals: people who mix sex and violence or sexually
misuse other people, including children. But, as a whole, gay men seem
to commit fewer homosexual crimes than non-gays commit directly
heterosexual crimes.)

8. Maybe one of the reasons we're not as violent is because,
as a
fairly regular practice among sexually liberated gay men, we lick each
other's perineums.

9. There are health problems involved with rimming. Lately
the AIDS
problem has caused many to stop rimming. Leaders of the community urge
us to restrict the practice severely. Sex practices involving the ass
can result in ingestion of fecal matter. Feces may carry protozoa (like
amoebas), bacteria, and viruses (like hepatitis) that should not be
taken by mouth. Indeed, amoebas were once thought to be the cause of
AIDS. A virus is now the favored theory, but there is still evidence
that amoebas in the belly depress the immune response and cause all
sorts of damage to the chemistry of the body.

10. There are solutions to these health problems. The safest
thing is
to develop a steady relationship which is at least exclusive enough to
preclude sexual contacts outside that relationship with any sort of
anal involvement. Even in that steady relationship, good hygiene is
mandatory. (Cleanliness is almost inherently indicated: who wants to
suck a dirty ass? The fetish that makes for scat sex is quite different
from perineal licking.) It's important to be aware of the risks of
developing a microbe infection as a result of oral-fecal contamination.
The symptoms can run from a mild, but peculiar diarrhea to severe
abdominal pains, cramping, and fever. The test's are expensive and
unreliable and the treatment is unpleasant, sickening, and also
unreliable. But it's important that everybody stay on top of the amoeba
issue.

11. It would radically alter gay sexual behavior if we all
decided that
rimming was more important than having multiple contacts and so we
begin to limit ourselves to steady, trustworthy partners, with only
occasional, very light recreational sex outside that relationship. But
just such a change is what gay social commentators are urging because
it would also reduce the transmission of AIDS.

12. If rimming and getting rimmed is really good for us
psychologically—and if indeed one of the causes of the intolerance
among human beings is that, because of the development of erect posture
and later because of religious prohibitions which forbid them from
assisting one another, people generally stopped perineal licking
then perhaps this practice is gay liberation's boon to human
consciousness. Maybe this is one of the things we have to teach them
about sex, sex roles, love and relationship.

13. At least, let us not assess that rimming is the
expendable
practice. We might then become as sexually screwed up as the
heterosexuals who are running the world.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.